Businesses and individuals rely on legally executed documents in a variety of contexts, from completion of complex forms used by governments and institutions (e.g., insurance forms, car loan and purchase forms, and the like), to simple contracts between individuals (e.g., lease agreements, wills, and a host of miscellaneous arrangements), with a range of contracts in between.
Documents signed by overnight envelope take a minimum of one day to reach the recipient and an additional day to be returned. Due to intra-office distribution delays and recipients' tendency to put paper documents in to-do piles, the average cycle time using overnight envelopes is 5-7 days. Documents signed by fax have an average cycle time of 2-3 days, due to intra-office delays, procrastination of paper document tasks, and fax machine mishaps. Faced with the burden of signing a paper document and returning it by fax, scan, or mail, many recipients put it down on their desk and forget about it.
While simply typing the signer's name fulfills the legal requirement for an online agreement, users find a “real” signature more assuring, and often third parties only accept documents signed by what appears to be a “real” signature, i.e., one that looks as though an individual put pen-to-paper to apply a personal signature. For online document signing, the presence of a handmade mark provides an extra level of authentication.
Some applications that allow documents to be signed online include typed signature, i.e., a series of typed letters and/or characters qualifies as a unique signer identifier. Others allow users to use an electronic pen on a separate pad piece of hardware, to store an on-site signature, which signature then is correlated with a site-specific activity, i.e., signing for a credit card at the check-out stand of a retail establishment. While graphics packages exist that allow users to create freestyle designs that are translated from a mouse or other peripheral device, for purposes of developing creative works, these typically are crude in effect, and do not exactly mimic the weight, velocity, and other metrics that are associated with a unique user signature.
Thus, there remains a need for a method and system for creating biometric signatures that have a high degree of specificity and correlation with the physical signing movements of a user. There also remains a need for having an integrated system that associates such a biometric signature with one or more documents to be signed and electronically transmitted over the internet for effective online document signing events.
In addition, users are increasingly turning to exchanging executed documents online These documents not only include a field for including a signature, such as the type described above, but may also include additional fields that may require the signer to initial, sign, or take some other action. However, in a large document, signers may easily lose track of how many such fields they are required to complete (i.e., sign, initial, fill with data), and how many they already have completed. Thus, when users of an online document exchange program encounter problems, such as a signer not completing a document, or a signer not understanding what actions are required, they turn to customer support. This not only slows down the completion progress of a signing event, but also increases the load on customer support. Thus, there remains a need for a system that identifies the fields that require signer action.